qutim looks, for most intents and purposes, to be a straightforward IM client with access to a goodly number of networks. Check the home page for the full list; of course the usefulness of any particular client lies with the networks it can access.

But if you’re after something that doesn’t stain your desktop theme with arbitrary icons and bizarre color schemes, you might like this QT-based one.

I haven’t exactly used it; I don’t IM with my blog address, but as you can see, it hooked up nicely to Jabber with my GMail account. Beyond that though, I haven’t really tested it. Give it a spin and see if it suits you.

I think I found Viewnior in the latest Slitaz, if I remember right. Considering that’s been out for quite a while, I’ve been sitting on this one for too long without mentioning it.

Nice and light (it wouldn’t be in Slitaz if it wasn’t 😐 ), speedy and clean, not too many flashy parts and a clean focus on image viewing. I sometimes still mispronounce it as if it was a film genre though — view-noir. 🙄

You get a lot more than just that when you install the Fox subsystem though. In that photo alone you can see a panel, a calculator, an editor and a control panel, and that wasn’t all that was available.

(Getting it started might be a tiny bit tricky: Try installing Openbox as well, starting the X environment with exec openbox in your .xinitrc file, then opening a terminal and entering export FOX_DESKTOP_WM="openbox" and then entering fxdesktop. That’s what did it for me.)

To highlight one or two, here’s adie, the editor, running solo as a downloaded binary from the Fox website.

It’s reminiscent of Beaver to me, but it’s obvious that this does quite a bit more and is meant to handle heavier coding chores. Likewise, here’s Shutterbug, a screen capture tool, performing independently of fxdesktop but included when Xfe was installed (I think … 🙄 ).

No, the bug doesn’t show up in your captured images, and actually it’s a nice touch since you can push that around the screen to wherever is convenient, and snap screenshots with a single click.

There’s more there and it all runs very light and relatively speedy. Any one of these things alone might be worthwhile on an underpowered, decade-old machine that doesn’t deserve retirement.

And you don’t have to feel trapped and powerless at the command line to use them. 🙄 As if that were even the case. … 😈

I’ve tried out Fox Desktop and checked into what software would run when built with the Fox Toolkit GUI. Seems like the FLTK GUI has more software options than the Fox Toolkit GUI. I did like the look of the Fox Desktop (sort of reminded me of a Windows machine), but somehow was more comfortable with just Fluxbox or Openbox. Several sample programs comes with the Fox Toolkit GUI library including ones you mentioned, shutterbug and adie. Pathfinder also comes with it and is a file manager. XFE is a separate file manager project based on Fox Toolkit and I personally like it a lot. Again, it reminded me of Windows. By the way, Fox Toolkit is a cross-platform GUI and the sample programs that come with it work on both POSIX machines and Windows. The only other useful programs I was able to dig up for Fox Toolkit were Goggles (an Ogle DVD player front end) and rezound (for audio editing). Not quite enough applications to make up a whole system using Fox Toolkit as the only GUI library, but still some nice programs.